It’s been a while since I wrote anything here. Mostly because my frisbee brain has been full up with planning seasons for the two teams I’m coaching this year: I’m very fortunate to be working with the German World Games team and Flame. I also want to go back a bit to the reason I started all this in the first place and reorient my work around coaching over anything else. And because I’ve been thinking so much about season planning I figured I would do something for that. Honestly I was going to roll this out as an online coaching workshop but I felt that it’d probably be more beneficial putting similar material out there where anyone can access it. Though the workshopping of season plans is a real valuable element that obviously I can’t do with a blog or a video so that’s a big element missing. However. I’ve released a video you can find here if you don’t subscribe to me on youtube:
That covers everything in a lot of detail but for those that prefer reading here’s a summarised version of the most important takeaways/
The goal is the most important thing
It’s absolutely critical that you know very clearly what your objective is for the season because it will (it should anyway) inform absolutely everything else you do. It’s hard to have a productive season without this being clear from my experience, because you get pushed and pulled in different direction throughout the year and mostly end up standing still as a result.
Structuring the Season
I highly recommend reading ‘Making the Ball Roll’ for advice on season structuring, it helped me a lot when I was learning to advance my coaching skills.
I essentially just copy this structure in my own clubs, starting with the goal as mentioned in the first point and then breaking the season down into ‘meso cycles’ of 4-8 weeks which generally can be aligned with tournaments. One key thing I do which I don’t see in a lot of other coaching plans is that I use the first block to introduce everything we are likely to do that year and the assess what needs more work, what can be binned and what clicked and doesn’t need that much extra. I find this more effective than doing a block one topic and then another and then another and building them up that way. Maybe it just suits my personality though.
Micro cycles are the actual individual practices and I don’t tend to plan more than a week in advance what these are going to be. Overplanning is not as bad as underplanning (I wouldn’t class them anywhere near the same level of issue) but can still lead to issues.
Learning and Performance Activities
It was a real lightbulb moment for me when I learned that the conscious brain is a terrible athlete. People don’t execute well when actively thinking. This freed me up a lot from stressing about how bad execution in sessions could become when I was teaching new things. I’m a lot more patient now and comfortable in the messy chaos of learning activities. And you need to welcome that mess as a coach if you want to see real progress over the course of a season. Players don’t like feeling like they are getting worse (individually or as a team) and they will revert to performance mode i.e. their existing habits whenever they can.
But you can spend too much time in learning activities as well. Moving into performance mode within your practices is a very important and necessary bridging step before competitive play. Every team is going to have their own balance of how much learning vs performance they need.
And of course, it makes total sense to load learning activities early in the season or away from tournament time, and increasing performance activities towards the end of the season. Generally the last meso cycle of the season is entirely performance based for my teams.
Feedback Periods
It’s helpful to plan when you’re going to look for formal feedback in advance. Both so you don’t forget about completely and also so you can receive the feedback at a time when you know you’re going to be able to do something about it. Getting it towards the end of a meso cycle so you can adjust the next one is probably ideal. If you get it just as you’ve started a meso cycle then there’s going to be more barriers to you being able to do anything with it.
Anticipate Challenges
The pre-mortem is one of my favourite tools. Visualize yourself at the end of the season, when you have NOT achieved your goal and ask yourself - "‘why did we fail to meet our goal?’. I’d be surprised if you weren’t able to quickly name issues that could result in failure - and you should consider how you can proactively tackle these.
We all fall into the trap of making plans based on everything going right. But it never happens like that. I also know from long experience that the causes of failure are generally pretty obvious and consistent year to year. Just don’t sleepwalk into the same problems again and again. That’s all I’m asking. You might not be able to solve them but you’ll feel a lot better for having tried to.
Those are my top practical tips for season planning - did I miss out on anything? Let me know.